Hi All, 

I recently ran into a frustrating issue when I tried to send shortened survey links with query strings via SMS. See below for a detailed description of the problem and the workaround I found: 

The problem: I am working on a longitudinal survey, and some participants will be sent links to the follow-up surveys via SMS messages. I need to pass embedded data from the first survey to the follow-up survey using query strings (see information on longitudinal surveys and query strings here and here). While you can use the SMS task in workflows to create a shortened link to a follow-up survey, there is no way to create a shortened link that includes the query strings that are needed to pass embedded data from first survey to the next one. As such, the link will look something like the first link in this text. But I wanted it to look like the opt out link at the bottom of the text.

The solution/workaround: There are various link shortening services that include a feature called “paramater passing.” In other words, these services allow you to create shortened links that pass the data -- or the parameters -- in the query string from the first survey to the second survey. Typically, you have to pay for this service, but I found one company, Dub, that does it for free! When you type the URL to your second survey into Dub, you should only type up to the question mark. For example: https:/survey.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_XXXXXXXXXXXXX?. 

You should then check off UTM Builder and type all of your query strings into the “UTM Term” box. Dub will then created a shortened link that includes all of your query strings and passes the embedded data from the first survey to the second. This shortened link can then be sent in the text of your SMS messages to all of your participants. 

See more information on Dub’s parameter passing capabilities here and more information on Dub’s UTM Builder here.

Feel free to tag me in the comments if you have any questions and I can try to help!